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I've seen this for years and years. Fact, once you get to 1920x1080 or higher with max detail settings the CPU in by far not the limiting factor in bleeding edge game graphics tech.

The CPU does however make an impact at all resolutions and detail settings when you are looking at high end RTS titles(hundreds-thousands of units doing stuff), flight simulators(MS Flight sim and its clones are completely CPU bound) or massive active world type games such as the Grand Theft Auto series(much like the RTS games, a ton of things happening at the same time).

As for crossfire on an APU, it's actually a great idea for mid range cards provided you have fast enough RAM to allow the APU to stretch it's legs.

Pairing an APU with a high end GPU, already being done, see the MSI GX60 http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GX60.html which is pairing the A10-4600m with an HD7970m in a 15" laptop. You get to have cake that isn't a lie, the HD7970m is only spooled up for heavy gaming and for heavy GPGPU tasks, when it isn't needed you get good all around performance and actual battery life so that you can use the laptop for actual work.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with OpenCL and GPGPU for in game physics. These APUs would be perfect for use as physics co-processors in the same way that Nvidia does with low end cards and PhysX.

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IIRC, these are not GCN (southern islands) parts, they use Northern Islands GPU cores, and those are really well supported by r600g.

Have AMD guys looked into this? Any tentative ETA?

My motherboard is dying and since it's an AM2 socket thing, I'll need to replace the processor at the same time. I'd love to go for one of these APUs, but I'd rather skip the Llano parts and go with Piledriver. I have to replace one of the graphics card at the same time (multi-seat) so I'd rather have kernel and Mesa support it.

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IIRC, these are not GCN (southern islands) parts, they use Northern Islands GPU cores, and those are really well supported by r600g.

Have AMD guys looked into this? Any tentative ETA?

My motherboard is dying and since it's an AM2 socket thing, I'll need to replace the processor at the same time. I'd love to go for one of these APUs, but I'd rather skip the Llano parts and go with Piledriver. I have to replace one of the graphics card at the same time (multi-seat) so I'd rather have kernel and Mesa support it.

Compiling from git is no problem.

They should work fine with the open source drivers. There were some display problems with certain configurations, but those should all be fixed now with the fixes in 3.6 kernels and newer as well as the stable series kernels. 3D is supported in mesa 8.0.5 and 9.0.

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They should work fine with the open source drivers. There were some display problems with certain configurations, but those should all be fixed now with the fixes in 3.6 kernels and newer as well as the stable series kernels. 3D is supported in mesa 8.0.5 and 9.0.

Comment

They should work fine with the open source drivers. There were some display problems with certain configurations, but those should all be fixed now with the fixes in 3.6 kernels and newer as well as the stable series kernels. 3D is supported in mesa 8.0.5 and 9.0.

I got a Trinity laptop and installed Ubuntu 12.10 and with the default kernel (3.5) and FOSS drivers it's looking great. 3D works WAAAY better than Catalyst, very stable, BUUUT, it kills my battery in less than 2 hours and heats A LOT, so I'm stuck with buggy catalyst for now. Are these problems already solved in newer kernels?

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I got a Trinity laptop and installed Ubuntu 12.10 and with the default kernel (3.5) and FOSS drivers it's looking great. 3D works WAAAY better than Catalyst, very stable, BUUUT, it kills my battery in less than 2 hours and heats A LOT, so I'm stuck with buggy catalyst for now. Are these problems already solved in newer kernels?

They are not solved, and will not be properly solved until dynamic power management is merged -- it is currently stuck in technical review, and nobody knows how long that will take.

In the meantime, you can use profile-based power management and force low power mode by default (enough for the desktop). Switch to high profile if you need 3d power for something manually. See http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for more info.

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They are not solved, and will not be properly solved until dynamic power management is merged -- it is currently stuck in technical review, and nobody knows how long that will take.

In the meantime, you can use profile-based power management and force low power mode by default (enough for the desktop). Switch to high profile if you need 3d power for something manually. See http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for more info.

Thank you for the answer Pingu. I had seen that page before and, if you are right and it's not working yet, then there's something to be corrected on that page because it's clearly saying that dynpm is working with kernel 2.6.35!!! and up, and on the feature matrix is written DONE in every square for Northern Islands.

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I didn't disable anything. I'm just running stock Ubuntu 12.10 here. I didn't really tried looking into it yet. Now I'm testing Catalyst 12.11 beta but it's still in a very sad state. Unfortunately I was expecting to do some gaming on Wine with this laptop as I was doing easily with my old desktop with a HD3000 discrete gfx card, but it's really not possible anymore. Look's like both Catalyst and Wine are way worst now than they were about 2 years ago. I'm trying here the same things I used to run and none work anymore, so, can't play games on Linux with my new laptop. I think it's time to give the free driver another chance. If it can just give me a smooth desktop to work on with long battery life and without burning my lap, that's good enough for now.

The sad thing is, I didn't have a dual boot and could do whatever I wanted with my Ubuntu desktop for years and now I can't. I don't use Windows for about 4 years now. It feels very awkward to go back to it just for playing the same games I used to play on Linux.